Science Fiction and Fantasy movies are notorious for shirking the rules of life and death, even within the confines of their own mythology. In the Harry Potter universe, for example, it’s supposed to be impossible for a person to be brought back to life, but then there’s Voldemort and a legion of ghosts. That being said, audiences hate to see their favourite characters and actors cut out of their favourite franchises, and everyone loves a happy ending.
Warning: This contains spoilers. See every movie ever released before continuing.
X-Men: The Last Stand:
X-Men: The Last Stand has the distinction of bringing not one, but two characters back to life in the same movie, at the bookends.
The character: Jean Grey
The death: Killed in a flood
How she came back to life: The Phoenix Force
In all fairness, fans of the X-Men comics were waiting for this event to take place. The death/life/death rebirth cycle Jean Grey goes through is considered one of the crowning achievements of a series that goes back to the 60’s. That being said, in the comics Jean is chosen as the vessel for a cosmic force that brings her back to life. In the movie, she reaches a new plane of telekinetic power and it’s not even clear if she died in the previous movie. Nobody bothered to check. Scott’s the only one who bothers to go looking, and that’s months later after he gets a telepathic signal. You’d think with the multi-million dollar super-jet and all their super powers that could have at least dredged the lake to look for her body. Or they could have reported her missing and let local authorities find the body for them. It’s not like she would have been arrested post-mortem for being a mutant. Jean still supposedly had family, who’d probably want her remains.
When asked how she’s still alive, she replies, “I don’t know.” That’s all the explanation beyond, “She’s a mutant,” the audience ever gets.
Come to think of it, how is anyone sure she’s dead at the end of the Last Stand? She survived being crushed under a tidal wave and drowned and then came back like she Jason Voorhees, why would being stabbed be any more effective?
The character: Professor X
The death: Being ripped to atoms by the Phoenix Force
How he came back to life: Mind-swap
Nobody in any movie ever has died as utterly as Professor X did in The Last Stand. Every molecule of his being is pulled apart and you see him torn to dust. After the credits roll, you’re treated to a scene where he’s entered the body of a comatose boy, an event which is eluded to earlier in the movie. This creates a weird implication that Professor X’s consciousness has always been separate and independent of his body, which means his powers function without his physical form. That means he might never have been a mutant to begin with.
Star Trek:
Star Trek: The Search for Spock:
The character: Spock
The death: Radiation
How he came back: Terraforming
Like the X-Men, characters in Star Trek are constantly dying and coming back to life.
At the end of the Wrath of Kahn, Spock dies heroically and is given a burial in space. That’s cannon. In the sequel, his body is brought to an experimental planet and is somehow brought back to life using a terraforming device which in no way is designed to do that. Not only does he come back, he’s a rapidly-aging kid again and his emotions (which he isn’t supposed to have as a Vulcan) control the weather on the new planet, Genesis. Then he goes back to normal, and resumes his old job as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Star Trek: Generations
The character: Kirk
The death: Saving Whoopi Goldberg
How he came back: Rescued by Picard from what was essentially his own personal Heaven, minus the green alien women. (Thanks Picard!)
If Spock’s resurrection made little sense, everything about Kirk being suspended in time/space for decades so he could team up with Picard made less sense. Since the pocket-dimension he was trapped in was a crucial part of the bad-guy’s evil plot, the movie itself made no sense. Seriously, what was the plan? The bad guy was going to blow up a planet to start a chain reaction that would let him access the Heaven-dimension and bring back his dead family, only he got a karate chop to the face by Kirk as a consolation prize. Kirk dies a few hours, if not minutes of being resurrected and gets buried on a lonely planet where no one will even visit his grave. To recap: Picard is a total dick.
Star Trek: Into Darkness:
Seriously: Spoilers. Skip ahead.
The character: Kirk
The death: Radiation. The exact same way Spock died.
How he came back: A blood transfusion
Typically, blood transfusions only work if you have a beating heart and every cell in your body hasn’t burst from radiation. KHAAAAAAAN’s blood is magic, though, and they decide to use it to save Kirk and not the dozens of other dead or injured people from the same attack. Bear in mind, Kirk’s already dead. In the extra feature to 28 Days Later, the directors discuss how they toyed with the idea of a blood transfusion as a cure for zombism, but decided that audiences would never buy it. Abrams knows better. His heroic death was just a role-reversal of what had already happened in another movie, meaning Abrams screwed audiences into paying to see something twice.
The Matrix: Reloaded
The character: Trinity
The death: Computer generated bullets
How she came back: THE ONE!
If you die in the Matrix, you die in real life. Unless you’re fucking Neo. Neo takes his hand and shoves it inside her (SFW) to remove the bullets and to BREAKOUT! KICKSTART MY HEART! Instead of resorting to CPR, he literally pumps her heart with his hand like he’s about to sacrifice her to Khali-Mah. Even with super-powers, it shouldn’t have worked, because her heart stopped in real life. She dies again in the next movie and Neo just kind of accepts it, even though he has super-powers in real life too (he can see even though he’s blind, and he can shoot out EMPs with his hands). Why it doesn’t occur to him that he’s essentially a God I won’t understand.
Superman:
The character: Lois Lane
The death: AVALANCHE!
How she came back to life: Time travel
Superman is expressly forbidden to use time travel by his father, who blabbed about it in the first place. Well guess what, dad? FUCK YOU! Supes spins around the world so fast it starts going backwards. This causes time to go backwards as well, instead of sending all the people, trees, oceans and everything else hurtling into space. His dad somehow magically appears and tries to talk him out of it, even though he’s just a recording on a crystal and not a Jedi. If you watch closely, you’d notice Supes only needs to go back a few minutes, but he spins the Earth around what must be several months. Still, he miraculously returns in the nick-of-time to save Lois, who doesn’t really understand she’s just been saved from certain death by a guy with about 1/16th of an inch of fabric between his Johnson and her. Is she really the real Lois Lane anymore, or just a different version from an alternative timeline? Super’s dick can’t tell the difference.
Crank: High Voltage:
The characters: Everyone
The death: Everyone
How they came back: Open-heart surgery/secret twin/head in a jar
Crank: High Voltage is better if you accept it as a parody of action movies. It uses every trick in the book to bring back every character that died in the first movie. Chelios is supposed to be deader-than-dead after plummeting out a helicopter while simultaneously succumbing to poison. He is literally scraped off the ground and has an artificial heart put in after some Chinese back-room surgery and aromatherapy. His gay sidekick returns in the form of a twin brother seeking revenge, who also has FBT (Full Body Tourettes). The bad guy from the first movie is back, but now he’s a severed head in a fish tank, hooked up to some tubes and shit. High Voltage is notable because Chelios dies several times in the movie after his artificial heart stops beating, and then again during the credits.
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
The character: Jason Vorhees
The death: Hung by the neck and drowned
How he came back: Girl with psychic powers
So there’s a girl with psychic powers and she’s having a tantrum, so she goes out on the dock at Crystal Lake and unleashes her psychic fury. Her telekinetic powers rock the dock and somehow brings Jason back to life. How? How the fuck should I know? Jason dies at the end of almost every Friday the 13th movies with a few exceptions, and since he’s a zombie to begin with it’s not hard to write in how he gets revived. In the past, lighting has done the trick like a Post-Modern Prometheus. The psychic-blast was a definite low-point in one of the most cheeseball franchises out there.
Peter Pan
The character: Tinkerbell
The death: Fucking with Captain Hook
How she came back to life: Clapping
This scene is replayed in a lot of different versions, where everyone has to say, “I believe in fairies!” and clap their hands, and I mean everyone. Even you, in the audience, are supposed to say, “I believe in fairies!” I’m pretty sure you have to do it when you read the book too. You wouldn’t want to be the one person who doesn’t. Imagine watching the movie with your kids and you didn’t say the magic words. They’d never trust you again. You’d be sitting at the dinner table and they’d be looking at you out of the corner of their eyes waiting for their moment to strike. You can’t just half-ass it either, like the National Anthem, or love-making. You have to feel it.
Snow White:
The character: Snow White
The death: Poison apple
How she came back: Date rape
Snow White wasn’t sleeping: she was fucking dead. Then the Prince rides in an gives her a kiss, and she magically comes back to life. How the fuck does that work? It wasn’t the same story as Sleeping Beauty, where only true love’s kiss would wake her. What would he have done if the dwarves and forest animals weren’t watching?
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
The characters: Megatron and Optimus Prime
The death: Michael Bay-PLOSION!
How they came back: Bullshit
Not one, but two characters are brought back to life in this movie at the bookends. Megatron is brought up from the ocean floor and revived like a zombie Bin Laden and then Optimus is brought back to life by Shia LeBouf’s terrible acting. This movie got a lot of flack, and rightfully so, for not giving a fuck about the audience’s limits for suspended belief. The worst part if how Optimus’s death almost mirrors the one in the animated movie from the 80’s which scarred a generation of kids. That movie was shocking in that it didn’t resolve Optimus’s death, and that you walked away knowing he was gone for good like Bambi’s mom (the TV series later revived Optimus). I realize they’re robots-in-disguise and that they’re essentially just machines that can be repaired, but the movie uses mythical artefacts and a “chosen one” to do the job a blowtorch and a wrench could have done.
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